On 11/2/22 4:20 PM, Andreas Dilger wrote:
On Nov 2, 2022, at 12:29 AM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, Nov 02, 2022 at 12:00:22AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
It really comes down to how badly do you want Christoph's code?
Well, Dave has made it clear implicily that he doesn't seem to care about
it at all through all this. The painful part is that I need to come up
with a series to revert all the code that he refused to add the notice
for, which is quite involved and includes various bug fixes.
This may be an unpopular opinion for some, but since all of these previous
contributions to the kernel are under GPL, there is no "taking back the
older commits" from the btrfs code. There is also no basis to prevent the
use/merge/rework or other modifications to GPL code, whether it is part of
btrfs or anywhere else in the kernel. That is one of the strengths of the
GPL, is that you can't "take it back" after code has been released. I don't
think anything David has done has violated the terms of the GPL itself.
David, as btrfs maintainer, doesn't even *have* to accept the patches to
revert changes to the btrfs code branch. The only real option for Christoph
would be to chose not to contribute new fixes to btrfs in the future.
This is all true, but it's definitely not the direction Sterba or any
of the other btrfs maintainers are going. If it happened that way, I
wouldn't even blame someone for avoiding us in the future.
We'll never get that far because we've known each other a long time and
I know both Sterba and Christoph are working with good intent here.
That said, it doesn't make sense to get into a pissing fight about this.
The best solution here is for Christoph and David to come to an amicable
agreement on what copyright notices that David might accept into the btrfs
code.
We talked about this at the btrfs meeting today and I'm sure it'll get
resolved soon.
-chris
